Pages

Sunday, June 30, 2013

In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother’s ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley.(

A short story collection that packs a punch this one
is a good choice for all those of you who enjoy darker fiction.

From the first sentence ("I
am boiling inside a kettle with five other people”), the reader gets thrown
into a strange, slightly askew world in which women have many, many odd jobs.
The creativity in these stories really has to be applauded, as well as the
sharp and insightful writing. The beginning stories are the best ones, with
some of the middle ones losing a little bit of steam, but I suppose that is
normal in most collections.

There is a certain humor in the
writing and the ideas behind the stories, but what really comes across is a careful,
nuances look at humanity and femininity in all its guises.

This collection is not for everyone.
You have to like the bizarre, the eclectic, and the slightly grotesque, but if
you want a taste of something completely different, then this one is a great
choice.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Charlotte and Nicole were once the best of friends, spending summers together in Nicole's coastal island house off of Maine. But many years, and many secrets, have kept the women apart. A successful travel writer, single Charlotte lives on the road, while Nicole, a food blogger, keeps house in Philadelphia with her surgeon-husband, Julian. When Nicole is commissioned to write a book about island food, she invites her old friend Charlotte back to Quinnipeague, for a final summer, to help. Outgoing and passionate, Charlotte has a gift for talking to people and making friends, and Nicole could use her expertise for interviews with locals. Missing a genuine connection, Charlotte agrees.

But what both women don't know is that they are each holding something back that may change their lives forever. For Nicole, what comes to light could destroy her marriage, but it could also save her husband. For Charlotte, the truth could cost her Nicole’s friendship, but could also free her to love again. And her chance may lie with a reclusive local man, with a heart to soothe and troubles of his own.

Romance novels are not my favorites, so I was a bit
hesitant to pick this book up. It did prove to be an interesting read, overall,
so I am not sorry I spent time on it.

Although it is a romance, the author does a nice job
of getting us fully into the characters’ heads at all times, so that we do get to
know Nicole and Charlotte pretty well. The beginning is a bit slow, I do have
to say, but if you give it a few chapters, you’ll definitely get involved with
the different characters’ lives.

The setting plays a huge part in the book’s ability
to trap the reader inside its pages. The descriptions are lovely, as is the whole
“small town” feel, though I do wish we’d gotten just a bit more on the town
life and the people who live in Quinniepeague.

The protagonists are nicely written, though some of
the scene changes between them were a little strange to follow. The writing itself
is not anything I can gush about, but it’s functional and gets the plot
through.

If you like romance novels with a bit of atmosphere,
then this one might be for you.

Paperbacks are my preffered format, although, really, any "real" book will do, even if it's hardcover. I do read ebooks on my iPad, but I still prefer books with pages that I can physically turn. I'm not a huge fan of hardbacks because they are a bit of a pain to hold, what with their heaviness and slipping covers, but I'll choose them any day over ebooks.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
From Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

"I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic , but we can still speak."

Monday, June 24, 2013

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…• Describe one of your reading habits.• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.

I got Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting from NetGalley because it sounded intriguing. I have to say, it definitely is. It's a short story collection that is very dark, many times grotesque, but so well written, with so much meat in it that it's hard to put down. If you're looking for a really dark read, then you might want to check this one out.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Billionaire Saul Abercrombie owns a vast tract of land on the Pembrokeshire coast. His plan is to restore the ancient forest that covered the area before medieval times, and he employs young arboreal expert Tom Curtis to oversee this massively ambitious project. Saul believes that restoring the land to its original state will rekindle those spirits that folklore insists once inhabited his domain. But the re-planting of the forest will revive an altogether darker and more dangerous entity – and Saul’s employee Tom will find himself engaging in an epic, ancient battle between good and evil. A battle in which there can be only one survivor.

What an interesting novel this was. With a
wonderfully rich atmosphere that grows on the reader like the very trees in its
pages, this story is a heady mix of horror and fantasy.

The novel depends wholly on the setting. All of it
takes place on a vast tract of wild land on the British coastline, where the
protagonists are gathered to fulfill a rich man’s dream: to build the land back
to what it was. Like any good Gothic horror novel, the setting becomes a
character, in this case a terrifying one that starts hunting down our heroes
and heroines. The mood is very important in this genre, and the author truly
does a great job in setting it for us to maximize our fright.

The characters, especially Saul and Tom, are nicely
written, though not as fully-fledged as I would have liked. We do get some
background into their lives, but not quite enough to be rooting for them as we
probably should be. Amelia, our villain, is just the right amounts sinister and
intriguing to keep us wanting to know more about her. Like I said before,
though, the land itself is the strongest character, and the one that lingers in
the reader’s mind.

If you are looking for a horror story that is truly
unique, I highly recommend this moody novel.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Monday, June 17, 2013

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…• Describe one of your reading habits.• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.My sister recommended A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle a while ago.He's the author of The Last Unicorn, and my sister really loved the book so I started it last week. It's a very interesting read so far. His writing is gorgeous and incredibly perceptive. I'm amazed at the skill he has with dialogue and with descriptions. Definitely enjoying it.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

For years, best friends Sarah and Jennifer kept what they called the “Never List”: a list of actions to be avoided, for safety’s sake, at all costs. But one night, against their best instincts, they accept a cab ride with grave, everlasting consequences. For the next three years, they are held captive with two other girls in a dungeon-like cellar by a connoisseur of sadism.

Ten years later, at thirty-one, Sarah is still struggling to resume a normal life, living as a virtual recluse under a new name, unable to come to grips with the fact that Jennifer didn’t make it out of that cellar. Now, her abductor is up for parole and Sarah can no longer ignore the twisted letters he sends from jail.

Finally, Sarah decides to confront her phobias and the other survivors—who hold their own deep grudges against her. When she goes on a cross-country chase that takes her into the perverse world of BDSM, secret cults, and the arcane study of torture, she begins unraveling a mystery more horrifying than even she could have imagined.

A thriller with lots of edge, this was a fun read
that seems to fly by.

Thrillers like this one are so difficult to write.
The author has to really have a hold of the pacing and the story he or she
wants to tell, otherwise the plot screeches to a stop. This is one of the more
successful ones I’ve read this year, so kudos to the author. The story grabs
our attention from the very beginning, from the first sentence, and it holds it
almost all the way through. There are some patches here and there in the
middle, in particular one section in which the main character goes into a BDSM
club that drags just a bit (what a strange sentence to type, by the way) but
for the most part the action stays at edge-of-your-seat-level.

The protagonist, Sarah, is an interesting one. We
slowly start learning about her as the pages pass although we do get the sense
she is still hiding something. I would have liked her to have been more of an
unreliable narrator; that, I think, would have taken this book to a whole other
level. As she is, we do know she is keeping stuff from us, but it’s not enough
to earn her the “unreliable narrator” title.

The story is obviously well thought out, with lots
of twists and turns that I won’t reveal. This is a great addition to the genre.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Q: Activity: Spine Poetry. Create a line of poetry with your book spines (take a picture). Not feeling creative? Tell us about your favorite poem.

My favorite poem is "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy. It is a poem about a man who is walking through a winter scene both externally and internally and hears a thrush singing in a tree. He asks himself what the bird could possibly be singing about with such joy when everything is so bleak.
I fell in love with it when I first read it, mainly because through my many bouts of depression, I've felt the same thing.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

When documentary filmmaker Rob Carrey flies back to New York from a shoot in South Africa to salvage his relationship with his lover Caroline Smythe, he unexpectedly finds himself called back to his former boarding school following a heartbreaking tragedy. Despite having long ago buried the memories of the brutal year he spent at the elite Fenton School in Connecticut as a postgraduate rower, Carrey finds that those days now return to haunt him.The Fenton School Boat Club’s top rowing team, called the God Four, is legendary. But the price that they pay for a shot at glory will scar each member of Carrey’s team far into adulthood.

Colin Payne, the Massachusetts blue-blood; Jumbo, the good natured giant; John Wadsworth the preppy lawyer-to-be; Ruth Anderson, the Yale-bound coxswain; and Rob Carrey, the scholarship athlete from Niccalsetti, New York — all of them are forever bound to one another by the terrible cost of victory. Over one tumultuous week, Rob Carrey will learn that he cannot leave the past in his wake.

This was a lovely literary novel about a boarding
school rowing team who are struck by a tragedy just as they are turning into
adults.

The story jumps back and forth from the present to
the past as we follow Rob through his life as a documentary film maker. Slowly,
we get flashes of the year he spent at boarding school, the author allowing
tension to build at a nice pace as we get more and more clues about the
impending tragedy. As with any literary novel, character development is the
most important thing. Rob is a carefully written narrator, with enough flaws to
keep his internal monologue interesting. The other characters, especially Ruth
and Connor are also well done. I do wish we’d learned a bit more about the
other two, Perry and Wads.

Something that really made this book stand apart
from others was the rowing. The author gives such a detailed look at this
particular sport, that those sections are some of the more interesting ones.
Although it can get a little technical, he makes the rowing experience come
alive for the reader, even for someone who knows nothing about the sport.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…• Describe one of your reading habits.• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.I just started reading The Memory of Trees by F.G. Cottam. It has a great Gothic feel to it that I'm really enjoying so far. I haven't gotten that far into it yet, but it promises to be an interesting read.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Since the age of ten, Mia has lived under the iron fist of the fundamentalist preacher who lured her mother away to join his fanatical family of followers. In Edenton, a supposed “Garden of Eden” deep in the South American jungle, everyone follows the Reverend’s strict but arbitrary rules—even the mandate of whom they can marry. Now sixteen, Mia dreams of slipping away from the armed guards who keep the faithful in, and the curious out. When the rebellious and sexy Gabriel, a new boy, arrives with his family, Mia sees a chance to escape.

But the scandalous secrets the two discover beyond the compound’s façade are more shocking than anything they ever imagined. While Gabriel has his own terrible secrets, he and Mia bond together, more than friends and freedom fighters. But is there time to think of each other as they race to stop the Reverend’s paranoid plan to free his flock from the corrupt world? Can two teenagers crush a criminal mastermind? And who will die in the fight to save the ones they love from a madman who’s only concerned about his own secrets?

Most of the young adult titles that I’ve recently
read have pretty much been the same: girl meets boy, girls falls head over
heels in love with boy, etc. We all know the formula, and we also know that a
lot of the YA fiction out there right now has a very thin plot line surrounding
the romance.Which is why I was so
surprised with this book. I can honestly say the plot twists in the novel were
some that were completely unexpected.

The main character, Mia, is a nicely developed protagonist
who manages to believably mature as the book comes to an end. There is no
rushed change of personality like in some other YA books when the author suddenly
decides the character needs to become a bit “fiercer”. No, in this one the
change is gradual and it keeps pace with the rest of the story.

The plot never dulls, and every chapter moves the
story forward. This is the kind of writing that grabs and hold your attention
from the beginning. The plot makes sense and there are no major loose ends. I’m
sure it is the first book in the series, but it has a pretty substantial
conclusion.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Yes. I broke up with the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton a while ago. I really enjoyed the first few books, but then the story got too diluted and the series felt more like a collection of sex scenes than an actual story. I don't have anything against a well-placed sex scene, but when the entire book is one, I lose interest.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.

Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite
contemporary writers, and since previous book hadn’t really done too much for
me, I was really anxious to see how this one would be. My verdict: she is a
writing goddess.

The premise seems simple enough: a colony of monarch
butterflies lands in the woods surrounding our protagonist’s house, upending
the entire town’s life when scientists come to study them. But there is so much
to this novel. There are layers and layers that even now, a day after finishing
the book, I’m still discovering. What impressed me most is the way she was able
to handle a topic like global warming (or climate change, pick your poison)
without sounding in the least bit preachy. That’s not an easy thing to do.

When I read her books I always feel like I’m
learning. She manages to infuse the prose with little science facts, making us
just a bit more aware of the world around us. Her writing, as always, is
phenomenal. She just has a way with words that leave the reader breathless. Her
plots are carefully written, her characters fully realized. In short, there is
not one thing I would change about this book.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…• Describe one of your reading habits.• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.I'm reading Escape from Eden by Elisa Nader. It is a young adult book that is really making me read long into the night. There is a great tension between the protagonists which will satisfy most YA genre lovers but there is also a great storyline which takes precedene over the romance. I'm about halfway through and really enjoying it.*For all of you Whovians out there, happy Bad Wolf day!*